FreeBSD Manual Pages

AUDIT(4) FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual AUDIT(4)
NAMEaudit -- Security Event Audit
SYNOPSISoptionsAUDITDESCRIPTION
Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable
logging of security-relevant events, and is intended to meet the require-
ments of the Common Criteria (CC) Common Access Protection Profile (CAPP)
evaluation. The FreeBSD audit facility implements the de facto industry
standard BSM API, file formats, and command line interface, first found
in the Solaris operating system. Information on the user space implemen-
tation can be found in libbsm(3).
Audit support is enabled at boot, if present in the kernel, using an
rc.conf(5) flag. The audit daemon, auditd(8), is responsible for config-
uring the kernel to perform audit, pushing configuration data from the
various audit configuration files into the kernel.
AuditSpecialDevice
The kernel audit facility provides a special device, /dev/audit, which is
used by auditd(8) to monitor for audit events, such as requests to cycle
the log, low disk space conditions, and requests to terminate auditing.
This device is not intended for use by applications.
AuditPipeSpecialDevices
Audit pipe special devices, discussed in auditpipe(4), provide a config-
urable live tracking mechanism to allow applications to tee the audit
trail, as well as to configure custom preselection parameters to track
users and events in a fine-grained manner.
SEE ALSOauditreduce(1), praudit(1), audit(2), auditctl(2), auditon(2),
getaudit(2), getauid(2), poll(2), select(2), setaudit(2), setauid(2),
libbsm(3), auditpipe(4), audit.log(5), audit_class(5), audit_control(5),
audit_event(5), audit_user(5), audit_warn(5), rc.conf(5), audit(8),
auditd(8), auditdistd(8)HISTORY
The OpenBSM implementation was created by McAfee Research, the security
division of McAfee Inc., under contract to Apple Computer Inc. in 2004.
It was subsequently adopted by the TrustedBSD Project as the foundation
for the OpenBSM distribution.
Support for kernel audit first appeared in FreeBSD 6.2.
AUTHORS
This software was created by McAfee Research, the security research divi-
sion of McAfee, Inc., under contract to Apple Computer Inc. Additional
authors include Wayne Salamon, Robert Watson, and SPARTA Inc.
The Basic Security Module (BSM) interface to audit records and audit
event stream format were defined by Sun Microsystems.
This manual page was written by Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>.
BUGS
The FreeBSD kernel does not fully validate that audit records submitted
by user applications are syntactically valid BSM; as submission of
records is limited to privileged processes, this is not a critical bug.
Instrumentation of auditable events in the kernel is not complete, as
some system calls do not generate audit records, or generate audit
records with incomplete argument information.
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) labels, as provided by the mac(4) facil-
ity, are not audited as part of records involving MAC decisions.
Currently the audit syscalls are not supported for jailed processes.
However, if a process has audit session state associated with it, audit
records will still be produced and a zonename token containing the jail's
ID or name will be present in the audit records.
FreeBSD Ports 11.2 May 31, 2009 FreeBSD Ports 11.2